About this book

This is a new edition of this important work which was first published in 1969, 33 years after Marais's death. Although he worked on this book during the last years of his life and told friends at the time that he considered it to be his masterpiece, the manuscript was considered lost for many years. Eugene Marais was the first man to conduct a prolonged study of primates in the wild. His study of the chacma baboons in Northern Transvaal's Waterberg led him to the conclusion that man's subconscious mentality is in fact the primitive, instinctive mind or psyche, which in the evolutionary process has been crowded out by the development of a reasoning intellect. In a letter to the translator of his book, "The Soul of the White Ant", he wrote the following about his research amongst the baboons: "You will be surprised to learn of the dim and remote regions of the mind into which it led me. I think I discovered the real place in nature of the hypnotic condition in the lower animals and men. I have an entirely new explanation of the so-called subconscious mind and the reason for its survival in man. I think that I can prove that Freud's entire conception is based on a fabric of fallacy. No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious in man who does not know the primates under natural conditions."

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